When the White House announced President Donald Trump would hold a press conference in the Rose Garden on Friday, many political reporters held on to their seats. Trump's performances are often unpredictable whirlwind displays, filled with lies, distractions, and attacks.

Already this week, Trump had tweeted a video in which a supporter of his said: "The only good Democrat is a dead Democrat." And Twitter decided to obscure one of his tweets on Friday morning because he had written "When the looting starts, the shooting starts" — a clear threat of violence toward the protesters in Minneapolis.

<p>He had expressed support for George Floyd, the black man whose death under the knee of white cop triggered outrage and protest in the city. But the president reverted to form as Minneapolis police and protesters clashed, culminating in the violent use of tear gas, broken windows, apparent arson, and ongoing violence. He deemed the demonstrations to be filled with "thugs," despite having previously cheered on armed anti-lockdown protesters. On Friday, fired police officer Derek Chauvin was arrested and charged with Floyd's murder, and Attorney General Bill Barr announced a federal probe into the death — moves that many hoped may quell the unrest.</p><script async="" src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script>
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</script><p>Meanwhile, the COVID-19 pandemic continues to rage in the United States; more than 1,200 people died from the disease on Thursday in the United States, according to Worldometer, and 22,000 more cases were discovered. Fears are growing that as social distancing measures have been relaxed around the country, new pockets of outbreaks emerge.</p><p>But Trump didn't address any of that in the Rose Garden on Friday — the ongoing pandemic, the rioting, the investigations, the charges, his own encouragement of violence. When he stepped up to the lectern, quite later than had been planned and flanked by some of his top officials what did he address?</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-twitter_embed">
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</p><p>Ah yes, China. Trump's chosen scapegoat for the pandemic and the more than 100,000 American deaths that occurred on his watch.</p><p>He blamed his predecessors in the Oval Office for failing to restrain China, while diving into a litany of the regime's abuses that have occurred during his presidency. The man who has claimed that his tough on China policy set him apart tried to blame the country for his own failures to contain the coronavirus. As he has before, he attacked the Chinese government for its concealment and deception about the virus in the early days, while accepting no responsibility for the fact that he, too, lied constantly about the risks and nature of the virus to the American people for much longer. And implicit in the story is that he swallowed China's propaganda about the virus completely, and in fact, he repeatedly praised China for its work to fight the virus and its transparency in the first months of 2020.</p><p>Trump also correctly noted that China is now moving to assert control over independent Hong Kong, a disturbing extension of its authoritarian power and a devastating blow to freedom in the region. For this reason, the Trump administration is withdrawing its recognition of Hong Kong as a distinct entity deserving of special privileges and treatment. But Trump made no indication that China will pay a price for this breach, or suggest any path forward that would preserve the territory's independence. And while he blames other leaders for every bad occurrence that happens during their time in power, he took no responsibility for this development.</p><script async="" src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script>
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</script><p>Finally, he came to the apparent kernel of news at the center of the Rose Garden event. The United States is withdrawing its support from the World Health Organization in the middle of a devastating global pandemic, he said, retaliation for what he perceives as China's undue influence over the organization.</p><p>While there's fair criticism to be made of WHO's deference to China, Trump's proposed solution, which he has floated previously, does nothing to solve the problem. It simply leaves China in place to further take control of the institution that has been key a player ameliorating global health crises over the decades, and it withdraws the United States from a position in which it can exert international leadership. While Trump said the United States' WHO funds will go toward other global health initiatives, it's not clear if any other body can take up the role the organization plays in fighting pandemics and coordinating international health efforts. Though this may be a "tough" move in Trump's mind, it may leave the entire world worse off in the middle of a pandemic — with no countervailing benefit.</p><p>And as Alex Ward of Vox pointed out, it's not even clear if <a href="https://www.vox.com/2020/5/29/21274949/coronavirus-trump-world-health-organization-withdraw" target="_blank">Trump</a> has the authority to withdraw the United States.</p><p>When Trump was done reading his teleprompter remarks in an almost bored monotone, he turned around and left the lectern, his aides who had stood beside him only as props in tow, with reporters calling out for him to take questions. What had been announced as a "press conference" turned out only to be a brief statement, wasting the time of all the reporters who had waited for Trump as the day ticked by. Reporters were stunned, having expected the president to address the many other issues roiling the nation. Instead, he seemed laser-focused on an issue he's trying to leverage for his re-election: demonizing China.</p><p>The world and country are in chaos and mourning, and it's clear both could use some leadership. But as many pointed out, it was probably better that Trump left the press conference without taking questions — his interactions with reporters have rarely if ever made anything better or clearer. He probably would have just stoked tensions among various groups even further.</p><p>Trump is incapable of being a leader for the country or the world. And it seems at this point, he's not even trying.</p>

There's a meme that appears now and then on Facebook and other social media: "Those who don't study history are doomed to repeat it. Yet those who do study history are doomed to stand by helplessly while everyone else repeats it."

That's funny. What's not is that the Trump administration and its coterie of China-bashers, led by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and aided by Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton, have recently been dusting off the fake-intelligence playbook Vice President Dick Cheney used in 2002 and 2003 to justify war with Saddam Hussein's Iraq. At that time, the administration of President George W. Bush put enormous pressure on the U.S. intelligence community to ratify spurious allegations that Saddam Hussein was in league with al-Qaeda and that his regime had assembled an arsenal of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. Fantasy claims they may have been, but they did help to convince many skeptical conservatives and spooked liberals that a unilateral, illegal invasion of Iraq was urgently needed.

<p>This time around, it's the Trump administration's reckless charge that Covid-19 -- maybe manmade, maybe not, advocates of this conspiracy theory argue -- was released perhaps deliberately, perhaps by accident from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, the city that was the epicenter of the outbreak late last year. It's a story that has ricocheted around the echo chambers of the far right, from conspiracy-oriented Internet kooks like <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfCd-LrQb7A" target="_blank">Infowars' Alex Jones</a> to semi-respectable media tribunes and radio talk-show hosts to the very highest reaches of the administration itself, including President Trump.<br/>
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Unlike with Iraq in 2003, the U.S. isn't planning on going to war with China, at least <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/10/opinion/china-coronavirus-trump.html" target="_blank">not yet</a>. But the Trump administration's zeal in shifting attention from its own bungling of the Covid-19 crisis to China's alleged culpability in creating a global pandemic only raises tensions precipitously between the planet's two great powers at a terrible moment. In the process, it essentially ensures that the two countries will be far less likely to cooperate in managing the long-term pandemic or collaboratively working on vaccines and cures. That makes it, as in 2002-2003, a matter of life and death.<strong><br/></strong></p><p><strong>Iraq Redux?</strong><br/>
Back in 2002, the Bush administration launched an unending campaign of pressure on the CIA and other intelligence agencies to falsify, distort, and cherry-pick intelligence factoids that could be collated into a package linking al-Qaeda and weapons of mass destruction to Saddam Hussein's Baghdad. At the Pentagon, neoconservatives like Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith set up an ad hoc team that eventually took on the name of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Special_Plans" target="_blank">Office of Special Plans</a>. It was dedicated to fabricating intelligence on Iraq.</p><p>
Just in case the message didn't get across, Vice President Cheney made <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2003/06/05/some-iraq-analysts-felt-pressure-from-cheney-visits/4afb2009-20e7-4619-b40f-669c9d94dcf3/" target="_blank">repeated visits</a> to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, to badger analysts to come up with something useful. In 2003, in "<a href="https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2004/01/lie-factory/" target="_blank">The Lie Factory</a>," which I co-authored with Jason Vest for <em>Mother Jones</em>, we reported on how Wolfowitz, Feith, allied Defense Department officials like Harold Rhode, and neoconservative apparatchiks like David Wurmser, then a senior adviser to Iraq-war-touting State Department Undersecretary John Bolton (and now an <a href="https://theintercept.com/2020/01/16/david-wurmser-iran-suleimani-iraq-war/" target="_blank">unofficial advisor</a> to Donald Trump on Iran), actively worked to purge Pentagon and CIA officials who resisted the push to shape or exaggerate intelligence. A year later, veteran spy-watcher James Bamford described the whole episode in excruciating detail in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Pretext_for_War" target="_blank">his 2004</a> book<em>, A Pretext for War</em>.</p><script async="" src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script>
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In 2020, however, President Trump is not just pressuring the intelligence community, or IC. He's <a href="https://www.justsecurity.org/66035/the-pattern-and-practice-of-trumps-assaults-on-the-intelligence-community/" target="_blank">at war</a> with it and has been busy installing unprofessional know-nothings and sycophants in top positions there. His bitter antipathy began even before he was sworn into office, when he repeatedly refused to believe a sober analysis from the IC, including the CIA and FBI, that President Vladimir Putin of Russia had aided and abetted his election. Since then, he's continually <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/05/21/trump-vs-the-deep-state?source=search_google_dsa_paid&amp;gclid=EAIaIQobChMIztmyt7Ks6QIVre7jBx2SSQyYEAMYASAAEgLrr_D_BwE" target="_blank">railed</a> and tweeted against what he calls "<a href="https://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176650/tomgram%3A_rebecca_gordon%2C_one_cheer_for_the_deep_state/" target="_blank">the deep state</a>." And he's assigned his authoritarian attorney general, Bill Barr, to conduct a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/05/08/next-administration-must-investigate-barr-his-henchmen/" target="_blank">scorched-earth offensive</a> against the work of <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/06/us/barr-mueller-investigation.html" target="_blank">Special Counsel Robert Mueller</a>, the FBI, and the Justice Department itself, most recently by <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/09/opinion/sunday/michael-flynn-william-barr-justice-department.html" target="_blank">dropping charges</a> against admitted liar Michael Flynn, briefly Trump's first national security advisor.</p><p>
To make sure that the IC doesn't challenge his wishes and does his bidding, Trump has moved to put his own political operatives in charge at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, or ODNI, created as part of an intelligence reorganization scheme after 9/11. The effort began in February when Trump named U.S. ambassador to Germany <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Grenell" target="_blank">Richard Grenell</a> as acting DNI. A highly partisan, sharp-elbowed politico and spokesman for former National Security Advisor John Bolton, he harbors far-right views and is a Trump loyalist, as well as an acolyte of former Trump aide Steve Bannon. On arriving in Bonn as ambassador, Grenell soon <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/04/new-us-ambassador-to-germany-under-fire-for-rightwing-support" target="_blank">endorsed</a> the rise of Europe's anti-establishment ultra-right in an <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/london/2018/06/03/trumps-right-hand-man-in-europe-wants-to-empower-european-anti-establishment-conservatives/" target="_blank">interview</a> with Bannon's <em>Breitbart News</em>.</p><p>
To bolster Grenell, the administration has called on another ultra-right crusader, <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2020/02/20/kash-patel-odni-post-116546" target="_blank">Kash Patel</a>. He has served as Republican Congressman Devin Nunes's aide in the campaign to discredit the Russia investigation and <a href="https://www.axios.com/national-security-council-staffer-denies-secret-ukraine-conversations-trump-e850964a-a743-4a81-94f4-6630f7f8cc77.html" target="_blank">reportedly</a> acted as a White House backchannel to Ukraine during the effort to stir up an inquiry in Kiev aimed at tarring former Vice President Joe Biden.<br/></p><p>Following that, the president <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/05/the-senates-abdication-of-advise-and-consent/611368/" target="_blank">re-named</a> Congressman <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ratcliffe_(American_politician)" target="_blank">John Ratcliffe</a> of Texas, one of the president's most enthusiastic <a href="https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2019/11/13/ratcliffe-bill-taylor-testimony-trump-zelensky-pressure-impeachment-hearing-vpx.cnn" target="_blank">defenders</a> during the debate over impeachment, to serve as Grenell's permanent replacement at ODNI. In 2019, Trump first <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2019/07/29/dem-senators-ratcliffe-nomination-intel-chief-1439110" target="_blank">floated</a> Ratcliffe's name for the post, but it was <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2019/08/02/trump-rep-ratcliffe-out-of-the-running-to-be-national-intelligence-director-1445150" target="_blank">shot down</a> days later, thanks to opposition from even Republican members of Congress, not to speak of intelligence professionals and various pundits. Now, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/05/john-ratcliffe-us-senate-national-intelligence" target="_blank">he's back</a>, awaiting likely confirmation.</p><p>
It remains to be seen whether the Grenell-Ratcliffe tag-team, combined with Trump's three-year campaign to disparage the intelligence community and intimidate its functionaries, has softened them up enough for the administration's push to finger China and its labs for creating and spreading Covid-19.</p><p>
<strong>The Wuhan Lab Lies</strong><br/>
As is often the case, that campaign began rather quietly and unobtrusively in conservative and right-wing media outlets.<br/>
On January 24th, the right-wing <em>Washington Times</em> ran a <a href="https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/jan/26/coronavirus-link-to-china-biowarfare-program-possi/" target="_blank">story</a> entitled "Coronavirus may have originated in a lab linked to China's biowarfare program." It, in turn, was playing off of a <a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-7922379/Chinas-lab-studying-SARS-Ebola-Wuhan-outbreaks-center.html" target="_blank">piece</a> that had appeared in London's <em>Daily Mail</em> the previous day. Written like a science-fiction thriller, that story drew nearly all its (unverified) information from a single source, an Israeli military intelligence China specialist. Soon, it moved from the <em>Washington Times</em> to other American right-wing outlets. Steve Bannon picked it up the next day on his podcast, "<a href="https://pandemic.warroom.org/" target="_blank">War Room: Pandemic</a>," calling the piece "amazing." A few days later, the unreliable, gossipy website <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/31/21117663/twitter-zero-hedge-suspended-platform-manipulation-policy-doxxing-coronavirus" target="_blank"><em>ZeroHedge</em></a> ran a (later much-debunked) piece saying that a Chinese scientist bioengineered the virus, purporting even to name the scientist.</p><p>
A couple of weeks later, Fox News <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/dean-koontz-book-predicted-coronavirus" target="_blank">weighed in</a>, laughably citing a Dean Koontz novel, <em>The Eyes of Darkness</em>, about "a Chinese military lab that creates a new virus to potentially use as a biological weapon during wartime." The day after that, Senator Tom Cotton -- appearing on Fox, of course -- agreed that China might indeed have created the virus. Then the idea began to go... well, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misinformation_related_to_the_COVID-19_pandemic" target="_blank">viral</a>. (Soon Cotton was even <a href="https://twitter.com/SenTomCotton/status/1229202134048133126" target="_blank">tweeting</a> that Beijing might possibly have deliberately released the virus.) By late February, the right's loudest voice, Rush Limbaugh, was on the case, <a href="https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2020/02/24/overhyped-coronavirus-weaponized-against-trump/" target="_blank">claiming</a> that the virus "is probably a ChiCom laboratory experiment that is in the process of being weaponized." (A vivid account of how this conspiracy theory spread can be found at the <a href="https://disinformationindex.org/2020/04/evolution-of-the-wuhan-lab-conspiracy-the-ad-funded-sites-spreading-it/" target="_blank"><em>Global Disinformation Index</em></a>.)</p><p>
Starting in March, even as they were dismissing the seriousness of Covid-19, both Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo repeatedly <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/17/politics/trump-china-coronavirus/index.html" target="_blank">insisted</a> on referring to it as the "China virus" or the "Wuhan virus," ignoring criticism that terminology like that was both racist and inflammatory. In late March, Pompeo even managed to <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/g-7-failed-to-agree-on-statement-after-us-insisted-on-calling-coronavirus-outbreak-wuhan-virus/2020/03/25/f2bc7a02-6ed3-11ea-96a0-df4c5d9284af_story.html" target="_blank">scuttle a communiqué</a> from America's allies in the Group of Seven, or G7, by demanding that they agree to use the term "Wuhan virus." It didn't take the president long to start <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/04/30/trump-china-coronavirus-retaliation/" target="_blank">threatening</a> retaliatory action against China for its alleged role in spreading Covid-19, while he began comparing the pandemic to the 1941 Japanese sneak attack on <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52568405" target="_blank">Pearl Harbor</a>.</p><p>
And all of that was but a prelude to the White House ramping up of pressure on the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community to prove that the virus had indeed emerged, whether by design or accident, from either the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology" target="_blank">Wuhan Institute of Virology</a> or the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Center_for_Disease_Control_and_Prevention" target="_blank">Wuhan Center for Disease Control</a>, a branch of the Chinese Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. An April 30th article in the <em>New York Times</em> <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/30/us/politics/trump-administration-intelligence-coronavirus-china.html" target="_blank">broke the story</a> that administration officials "have pushed American spy agencies to hunt for evidence to support an unsubstantiated theory that a government laboratory in Wuhan, China, was the origin of the coronavirus outbreak," and that Grenell had made it a "priority."</p><p>
Both Trump and Pompeo would, in the meantime, repeatedly assert that they had seen actual "<a href="https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/495571-trump-says-he-has-seen-evidence-linking-coronavirus-to-wuhan-lab" target="_blank">evidence</a>" that the virus had indeed come from a Chinese lab, though Trump pretended that the information was so secret he couldn't say <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/30/politics/trump-intelligence-community-china-coronavirus-origins/index.html" target="_blank">anything more</a> about it. "I can't tell you that," he said. "I'm not allowed to tell you that." Asked during an <a href="https://www.state.gov/secretary-michael-r-pompeo-with-martha-raddatz-of-abcs-this-week-with-george-stephanopoulos/" target="_blank">appearance</a> on ABC's <em>This Week</em> if the virus had popped out of a lab in Wuhan, Pompeo answered: "There is enormous evidence that that's where this began."</p><p>
On April 30th, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a <a href="https://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/press-releases/item/2112-intelligence-community-statement-on-origins-of-covid-19" target="_blank">terse statement</a>, saying that so far it had concluded Covid-19 is "not manmade or genetically modified," but that they were looking into whether or not it was "the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan." There is, however, no evidence of such an accident, nor did the ODNI cite any.</p><p>
<strong>A Finger on the Scale</strong><br/>
The run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2002-2003 should be on all our minds today. Then, top officials simply repeated again and again that they believed both Saddam Hussein's nonexistent ties to al-Qaeda and his nonexistent active nuclear, chemical, and bioweapon programs were realities and assigned intelligence community collectors and analysts to look into them (while paying no attention to their conclusions). Now, Trump and his people are similarly putting their fat fingers on the scale of reality, while making it clear to hopefully intimidated intelligence professionals just what conclusions they want to hear.</p><p>
Because those professionals know that their careers, salaries, and pensions depend on the continued favor of the politicians who pay them, there is, of course, a tremendous incentive to go along with such demands, shade what IC officials call the "estimate" in the direction the White House wants, or at least keep their mouths shut. That is exactly what happened in 2002 and, given that Grenell, Patel, and Ratcliffe are essentially Trump toadies, the IC officials lower on the totem pole have to be grimly aware of what their latest bosses expect from them.</p><p>
There was near-instant pushback from scientists, intelligence officials, and China experts about the Trump-Pompeo campaign to finger the Wuhan lab. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the preeminent American scientist and Covid-19 expert, promptly <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/05/fauci-dismisses-trump-claim-coronavirus-started-wuhan-lab-200505170558959.html" target="_blank">shot it down</a>, saying that the virus had "evolved in nature and then jumped species." That's because actual scientists, who study the genome of the virus and its mutations, <a href="https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2020-05-09/was-the-coronavirus-made-in-a-wuhan-lab-heres-what-the-genetic-evidence-shows" target="_blank">unanimously agree</a> that it was not generated in a lab.</p><p>
Among America's allies -- Australia, Britain, Canada, and New Zealand -- in what's called the Five Eyes group, there was an unambiguous <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/04/politics/coronavirus-intelligence/index.html" target="_blank">conclusion</a> that the virus had been a "naturally occurring" one and had mutated in the course of "human and animal interaction." <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/australian-intelligence-knocks-back-us-government-s-wuhan-lab-virus-claim-20200504-p54pk3.html" target="_blank">Australia</a>, <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-australia-china/australia-annoyed-as-u-s-pushes-wuhan-lab-covid-19-theory-idUSKBN22K118" target="_blank">in particular</a>, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/07/australia-hits-back-at-us-claim-linking-coronavirus-to-wuhan-lab" target="_blank">rejected</a> what appeared to be a fake-intelligence dossier about the Wuhan lab, while German officials in an internal document <a href="https://www.courthousenews.com/germany-doubts-us-claim-of-wuhan-virus-lab-leak/" target="_blank">ridiculed</a> the lab rumors as "a calculated attempt to distract" attention from the Trump administration's own inept handling of the virus.</p><p>
Finally, <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-05/trump-pushes-virus-from-china-lab-theory-that-divides-u-s-spies" target="_blank">according to</a> <em>Bloomberg News</em>, those studying the issue inside the intelligence community now say that suspicions it emerged from a lab are "largely circumstantial since the U.S. has very little information from the ground to back up the lab-escape theory or any other." In the end, however, that doesn't mean top IC officials beholden to the White House won't tailor their conclusions to fit the Trump-Pompeo narrative.</p><p>
John McLaughlin, who served as deputy director and then acting director of the CIA during the Bush administration, believes that we are indeed seeing a replay of what happened in Iraq nearly two decades ago. "What it reminds me of is the dispute between the CIA and parts of the Bush administration over whether there was an operational relationship between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda," he <a href="https://news.wjct.org/post/trump-pushes-theory-virus-origins-some-see-parallels-lead-iraq-war" target="_blank">said</a>. "They kept asking the CIA, and we kept coming back and saying, 'You know, it's just not there.'"</p><p>
Whether the tug-of-war between Trump, Pompeo, and the IC is just another passing battle in a more than three-year-old war between the president and the "Deep State" or whether it's something that could lead to a serious crisis between Washington and Beijing remains to be seen. Ironically enough, in January and February of this year, the IC <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/us-intelligence-reports-from-january-and-february-warned-about-a-likely-pandemic/2020/03/20/299d8cda-6ad5-11ea-b5f1-a5a804158597_story.html" target="_blank">provided</a> President Trump with more than a dozen <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/presidents-intelligence-briefing-book-repeatedly-cited-virus-threat/2020/04/27/ca66949a-8885-11ea-ac8a-fe9b8088e101_story.html" target="_blank">clear warnings</a> about the dangers to the United States and national security posed by the coronavirus, <a href="https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situation-reports/20200121-sitrep-1-2019-ncov.pdf" target="_blank">following</a> clarion calls <a href="https://www.who.int/csr/don/12-january-2020-novel-coronavirus-china/en/" target="_blank">from China</a> and the <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/lisettevoytko/2020/01/30/coronavirus-1st-us-human-to-human-transmission-confirmed-right-before-who-emergency-meeting/#44e30d07fcac" target="_blank">World Health Organization</a> that what was happening in Wuhan could <a href="https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situation-reports/20200121-sitrep-1-2019-ncov.pdf?sfvrsn=20a99c10_4" target="_blank">spread</a> worldwide -- warnings that Trump either failed to notice, disregarded, or downplayed through March.</p><p>
Were Donald Trump not so predisposed to see the intelligence community as his enemy, he might have paid more attention back then. Had he done so, there would undoubtedly be many less dead Americans right now and he wouldn't have had to spend his time in his own lab concocting what might be thought of as batshit excuses for his dereliction of duty.</p><p>
By the time this affair is over, the invasion of Iraq could look like the good old days.</p><p><br/></p><p>
<em>Bob Dreyfuss, an investigative journalist and </em><a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176671/tomgram%3A_bob_dreyfuss%2C_a_giuliani-trump_foreign_policy/" target="_blank">TomDispatch<em> regular</em></a><em>, is a contributing editor at the </em>Nation<em> and has written for </em>Rolling Stone<em>, </em>Mother Jones<em>, the </em>American Prospect<em>, the </em>New Republic<em>, and many other magazines. He is the author of </em><a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/0805081372/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20" target="_blank">Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam</a><em>.</em></p><p>
Copyright 2020 Bob Dreyfuss<br/>
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